Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday September 24, 2012 @10:53AM
from the just-go-with-this dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In a blog post responding to the latest controversy over Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth says 'integrating online scope results' are 'not putting ads in Ubuntu' because the shopping results 'are not paid placement', but 'straightforward search results'. He goes on to explain his plans to make the Home Lens of the Dash a place to find 'anything anywhere'. Like a cross between Chrome OS's new app launcher, Siri and Google Now 'it will get smarter and smarter' so you can 'ask for whatever you want' it 'just works'."

We picked Amazon as a first place to start because most of our users are also regular users of Amazon, and it pays us to make your Amazon journey get off to a faster start. Typing Super “queen marking cage” Just Worked for me this morning. I am now looking forward to my game of Ultimate Where’s Waldo hunting down the queens in my bee colonies, Ubuntu will benefit from the fact that I chose to search Amazon that way, Amazon benefits from being more accessible to a very discerning, time-conscious and hotkey-friendly audience.

Cool, thanks for at least being honesty about that part. Although I don't understand why this wasn't the front-and-center thesis of your blog post. You're getting paid to bring us to Amazon faster. Okay. You can opt out of it but it's enabled by default. Okay. I get that. It's okay, nobody's going to fault you if you're trying to figure out new revenue models. But you should really be up front with your user base about it or you're going to get some seriously knee jerk reactions that might doom your product before it's out the door (regardless of how true it is). You're running damage control now and that probably could have been avoided if your floated this out in front of "leaked" screenshots.

I'm also really curious about this next part of your answer to this question:

But there are many more kinds of things you can search through with Unity scopes. Most of them won’t pay Ubuntu a cent, but we’ll still integrate them into the coolest just-ask-and-you’ll-receive experience. I want us to do this because I think we can make the desktop better.

So what happens when it's time to integrate and "bring the user faster" to Barnes & Noble? What happens when you've "integrated" with both Amazon, B&N, Abe's Books, eBay, Go Hastings, etc and I type in "Ender's Game"? What happens when the outfit that sold you your "queen marking cage" doesn't sell them on Amazon and there's middle men re-listing everything at a higher price on Amazon on the chance that someone with a default scope searches for it through Ubuntu? I have reservations that this move is making an already omnipotent Amazon unduly more powerful...

I might find this useful if I could choose which retailers to include or exclude. No NewEgg? Add it. Don't like Amazon? Delete it.

Someone (not google, apple nor microsoft) should act as a clearing house for payment for these custom searches as these very "well-qualified sales leads" are much more valuable to a retailer than random Ubuntu-sent queries through a private Amazon acting as a commercial clearinghouse.

If they follow the example of Mint and Firefox, inclusion and exclusion would be fair game. Even if they don't, it's open source. And unlike carrier-defiled Android, they can't remove your administrative rights from the machine so you'd have to root it (well, they can, but that would be a whole new level of stupid). Shuttleworth already said he doesn't want the Unity dock placed on the bottom of the screen, but mods are trivial and aplenty.

What happens when the outfit that sold you your "queen marking cage" doesn't sell them on Amazon and there's middle men re-listing everything at a higher price on Amazon on the chance that someone with a default scope searches for it through Ubuntu?

You mean like today? There's always more places to look but there's a diminishing gain, for the most part I only check prices until it's reasonably optimal not check every store to see if somebody, somewhere offers it for $2 less. Your mileage - and valuation of your time - may vary.

If I'm searching for a product, why wouldn't I want Ubuntu to point me to people selling it? It's a money making scheme which actually benefits the users. Ads are annoying because they push products you aren't looking for. Intelligent search results are just better search results. They're showing me what I'm looking for.

I'm not sure I want everything I type/search for filtered through Amazon, or anyone for that matter. For example, I have Google Instant disabled for a reason: A) it's my network bandwidth, B) I'll send my query when I'm damn well and ready...

If I'm searching for a product, why wouldn't I want Ubuntu to point me to people selling it? It's a money making scheme which actually benefits the users. Ads are annoying because they push products you aren't looking for. Intelligent search results are just better search results. They're showing me what I'm looking for.

Weird, when I want something, I just use google. If i want something from amazon, I can go to amazon's web page. If I want something from Newegg, I go to Neweggs web site. Otherwise, I use google and see what the various pricing is like.

Justify this all you want, but lets be real. It's about Ubuntu making more money and changing the face of linux forever, and not for the good.

If I'm searching for a product, why wouldn't I want Ubuntu to point me to people selling it?

I can't speak for you, but for me, I don't want a third party to be involved in what was a simple transaction between me and the people selling it. Especially not the producers of my OS. It doesn't matter if they're Apple, Microsoft, or Canonical, what I'm looking for and buying is None Of Their Business.

This is even more important when we're talking about searching my own computer. Using the lens, Canonical will now know every search you perform, even if you're only searching locally.

It's a money making scheme which actually benefits the users. Ads are annoying because they push products you aren't looking for. Intelligent search results are just better search results. They're showing me what I'm looking for.

But the simple fact is, and I can't believe on a supposedly libertarian leaning site i even have to point this out, TINSTAAFL and sadly with the GPL there isn't really any ways to make money on the desktop other than ads or the tin cup model, which doesn't bring in enough steady revenue to keep the lights on, much less pay for all the devs required to even maintain much less update something the size of Ubuntu. Oh and before someone brings up servers we are talking desktops NOT servers, servers are a differ

Although that's true, Mint has sort of worked itself into a corner. Since its claim to fame now is supposed to be as the un-Unity distro, they can't quite put it back in. And if they do, what's the point of bothering with Mint as opposed to stock Ubuntu? There have been some bugs with Mint, so that'd be another reason to just stay with Ubuntu.

Same goes for xubuntu, lubuntu, etc. They can't quite put shopping-lens-enabled Unity in the mix.

so many other things that need fixing, and they're whacking off about internet search.

To be frank, a lot of what needs fixing takes money to fix. Particularly integration and compatibility issues which seem to be, by far, the biggest source of problems. This requires labs full of hardware and people to develop and automate the testing.

If you're struggling to find sources of income (which wouldn't surprise me, given the attitude expressed here on Slashdot previously) then it's hard to step up and develop the

Quite right. I never understood the appeal of Ubuntu, excepting when it acted as a strong emergency cd for hosed systems --- at which it was excellent; it's sudden lunge into Unity, like Microsoft's equal panic into Metro, seems both pure fail and stormy petrel of future accepted, planned-for, managed decline.

Oddly there are a few Linux 'personalities' who appear to actively favour Windows methodology, not to mention Microsoft's undoubted power, and wish either to join with them ( and be subsumed if th

Support contracts work great when you're making desktop OSes that can be used in businesses. Then you can release the same OS (or a slightly different version) for free to home users and other non-payers, to build more mindshare. Exactly the way that Red Hat and Fedora do it.

Every time you search for a local file on your computer, the details of that search will be transmitted to a third party cloud service. That is a huge potential privacy issue regardless of who that service is. Worse, they they don't even make their users aware of this fact, which is completely unacceptable. That Canonical still doesn't understand this after being having it brought to their attention means they clearly cannot be trusted to assemble a secure Linux distribution.

We are not telling Amazon what you are searching for. Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf. Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already. You trust us not to screw up on your machine with every update. You trust Debian, and you trust a large swathe of the open source community. And most importantly, you trust us to address it when, being human, we err.

I also trust Ford to build a car that won't get me killed in a car crash, I trust them do keep that up with spare parts, recalls and authorized service centers. It doesn't mean I want them to install a GPS tracker in my car so they can "improve my experience". Saying you should trust Ubuntu because they already 0wn your computer isn't exactly a confidence builder.

I also trust Ford to build a car that won't get me killed in a car crash, I trust them do keep that up with spare parts, recalls and authorized service centers. It doesn't mean I want them to install a GPS tracker in my car so they can "improve my experience". Saying you should trust Ubuntu because they already 0wn your computer isn't exactly a confidence builder.

It is easy to turn off, and it is open source, so everyone can audit it.

I've read their response and it is bullshit. There is a difference between trusting someone to write software for you, and trusting them to receive your private information over the internet. For example, hospitals may trust software to process patient data. They don't (and can't by law) trust that software to send patient info to some random cloud service. Home users deserve the same respect as corporate users and should be informed of any services that transmit their information so they can decide whether

As I mentioned before, I don't want everything I type/search for sent elsewhere. It's my bandwidth and my information, *if* I want to search elsewhere, I'll explicitly query elsewhere. I have Google Instant disable for reasons like that...

Let's breed smarter users that know about things and how they work, rather than dumber users that rely on things that "just work" and have no idea how they work.

1a.) In what way does advertisement encourage over-consumption beyond what would be caused by non-paid information from, for instance, a review website? And what proof do you have that people are more inclined to purchase anything (not more inclined to purchase one product over another, but inclined to buy something at all) because they've seen an advertisement? Keep in mind that these ads will be targeted based on search information the user enters. If I'm searching

While you're right, it's only in a vacuum or for small, local services if the competition doesn't decide to also invest in ads. When you and all your competitors engage in ad wars, like you pretty much have to do in a global market, then you keep investing hefty sums in ad campaigns just so you won't lose market share, and that increases everyone's prices. Given diminishing returns, frequently these corps are already making their products pretty much as cheap as they are always going to be, so the result is

These companies can only afford to give away free stuff for so long before the investors demand that they start making serious money from the fanbase (i.e the product, eyeballs in this case) and that means more invasive advertising. Google will do it too eventually.

Canonical does a bit of development work but its not huge. Linux would survive without them. Most of what they been doing the past while is unnecessary interface changes and cloud integration in an attempt to be in with the cool kids and also all these cloud things provide data for mining and if people get too dependent on it they can even charge fees to use it.

It would, but it would be a pale shadow of its current self. Sure it'd survive on servers and in the mobile space, but the desktop would be even tinier. What would Valve do, shift their target to Fedora? Which is even less end-user targeted than Ubuntu?

A very miniscule proportion of what attracts Valve to Ubuntu has anything to do with what Canonical has done. Like any other distribution, Ubuntu is the combination of a number of upstream projects. Canonical really gets much more than it gives in this respect.

What Canonical does is mainly configuration management and that it tends to do poorly. They already have a bad reputation for pushing out versions before they're ready or making other bad decisions.

The fact that they've decided to put on the afterburners after having jumped the shark is really no surprise to anyone.

I have been thinking long and hard about this and I can only come to this conclusion.
It is a nice feature. It needs tweaks, so results for photoshop don't pop up, or if they do it should explain it's not compatible with Linux.
But what it needs more than anything, which is something Canonical keep missing out of all of their super new features is a simple tickbox for on or off. I understand that this is still beta, and it's certainly not LTS so it is more or less a testing platform, so I'm not jumping up and down right now. Canonical have proven to me that they can iron things out between normal releases and LTS, and I'm happy to accept that this may well be the case here. I'm basing this on evidence that I have seen over the last 4 years, not just what Mark says.
This really is a great step forward for UX, as it is saying "hey, let's do more 'cloud' stuff from the desktop." Think about what else will be possible with a bit of thought. We could have it bring up all of your photos, from all sources (picassa, facebook, twitter) and present them in one place. I could type something like "London" into my dash and it shows me all the photos I've taken in London, a list of all my friends who are currently *in* London, and maybe sell me a London guide book. I cannot begin to express how awesome features like this can be.
Amazon is only a single step to a full set of amazing features, and we must remember that these aren't *ads.* I am searching for a product, I can chose to buy it, and I won't get prompted to buy anything similar next time I fire up the dash.
One thing that I also think is important to remember, is that we are a set of pretty clued up power users and as such we will see problems and we will jump to justify why something is a bad idea. However, if I were to install this on my Dad's laptop tomorrow, I can guarantee he would actually be quite thrilled with this feature. This is Linux for Human Beings and I think product searching is a very human thing to have.

I have been thinking long and hard about this and I can only come to this conclusion. It is a nice feature. It needs tweaks, so results for photoshop don't pop up, or if they do it should explain it's not compatible with Linux. But what it needs more than anything, which is something Canonical keep missing out of all of their super new features is a simple tickbox for on or off.

If I use the tickbox you are suggesting to turn the feature off, will the system still be tracking my queries for use the next time I turn the feature on? I'm not suggesting that Ubuntu would do that *now*, but it strikes me as a slippery slope kind of thing, and they could easily justify it to themselves in the future, especially under pressure from their corporate partners.

One thing that I also think is important to remember, is that we are a set of pretty clued up power users and as such we will see problems and we will jump to justify why something is a bad idea.

I think that's really where a lot of the pushback is coming from. The typical "clued up power user" is only too aware of how such mec

Some people are also questioning if the home lens (the default lens to make any local search) is the right place to integrate these remote searches to third party services. In theory, amazon could gather information about every file you search, every program you launch through the lens, and such. There is even a bug report [launchpad.net], marked as confirmed, questioning this very thing.

In theory, amazon could gather information about every file you search, every program you launch through the lens, and such

AGAIN. From TFA:

Why are you telling Amazon what I am searching for?

We are not telling Amazon what you are searching for. Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf. Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already. You trust us not to screw up on your machine with every update. You trust Debian, and you trust a large swathe of the open source community. And most importantly, you trust us to address it when, being human, we err.

And:

There is even a bug report [launchpad.net], marked as confirmed, questioning this very thing.

That is marked as confirmed because it affects multiple users, and relates to a more broad list of concerns than what you infer. The way you word it points to a bug about Amazon seeing your keystrokes, while the bug report is more of a list of concerns such as opt-in vs opt-out, making the amazon lens separate from home etc.

Ubuntu was at one time an appealing alternative to Windows. I had it running on a desktop and laptop at home, and at least one VM at work ran Ubuntu. It just worked. But the minute they came up with this Unity dashboard thing, it broke the familiar UI and as far as I'm concerned, tweaking Ubuntu to make it usable again to myself and my users became more effort than it was worth.

Meanwhile, Suse has plowed ahead with a record of pretty consistent, solid distributions. Fedora's been pretty good as well, but once I got Suse I just got used to the Suse way of doing things and didn't look back.

Yeah, I miss how Ubuntu can locate printers very reliably on the network, while I have to manually plug in the IP addresses in YaST, but that's not a show stopper. What is a showstopper is when I can't find basic stuff like the calculator because it's been moved from a simple accessories pulldown menu and hidden in some goofy app picker.

This ad thing is merely more fuel on the fire. I don't get what those people are thinking. I guess they have to keep pushing the envelope, looking for ways to monetize their product and keep growing, but I would have thought they'd do better by just making it the easiest and most affordable alternative there is to Windows. Anyway -- R.I.P. Ubuntu!

As a fellow that's the family's tech support I agree. I installed Ubuntu on my mother's laptop because of the "noob friendliness" and it just working. Ubuntu had a Gnome interface and deb-package management which I am both familiar with and I never had problems with it.

I need to keep things consistent. And since this whole Unity thing was introduced as not just something that's a feature, but as the default window manager and me having to install Ubuntu again, I needed to install gnome-shell myself, and tha

I get Apport popups all the time in *buntu development releases, but then that's regardless of the desktop environment. I'm really quite happy with Kubuntu... the simplicity and mostly-just-working-ness of Ubuntu combined with little of the bother, some of the momentum, and a (by now again) very capable, configurable desktop environment. Of course, "works for me" is as anecdotal as "doesn't work for me".

Whether or not the ribbon has had an adverse impact on you personally, it is still what users coming from a Windows environment are used to - and they will no doubt find that an interface based on Office 97-2003 does indeed look old fashioned.

I certainly know from personal experience that when I have to use a machine which has an older version of Office on, I really struggle with finding my commonly-used features and it takes me longer to do pretty much anything.

Ummm, Are you getting paid? Would you still get the money if you removed the Amazon component from the OS? OK, let's see if you can follow this: When you get paid for a commercial placement, that is paid placement. The fact that the individual items displayed are not paid placements does not change the fact that the entire component is a paid placement.

This is just his nature. He is a sleazeball. That's why so many of us were so hesitant to use Ubuntu way back when it started rising. Do we really want to get an OS from this glorified PHB? What slimy crap is he going to pull next? On the upside, he also has some really stupid ideas about the direction of the UI, so it doesn't hurt to just walk away. Just walk away.

If what you are implying was true, I wouldn't have a Linux Mint machine right next to me (though, admittedly, this one is stripped-down Debian testing with XFCE). I have my hard-core machines, my user-friendly machines, and I even have two MacBook Pros. I even ran Ubuntu on one of my primary laptops for more than a year -- get this -- because it was user-friendly.

This is just his nature. He is a sleazeball. That's why so many of us were so hesitant to use Ubuntu way back when it started rising. Do we really want to get an OS from this glorified PHB? What slimy crap is he going to pull next? On the upside, he also has some really stupid ideas about the direction of the UI, so it doesn't hurt to just walk away. Just walk away.

Wow, that is the first time I have seen this. Please drink a glass of water, relax.

... as in an application/add on/option type of functionality. And to increase interest, not that google general search results always find what you want, provide the users with easy to use filtering.... so if they boycott a company, they don't have to see their ads when searching.

We are not telling Amazon what you are searching for. Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf. Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already.

I don't equate having root with having people's data, personally. I happen to adhere to a Ethics Code (SAGE's [lopsa.org]) that *keeps* me from peeking over people's personal data, *especially* for my own interests. Adding a snitch that report back not only the machine's existence (you get that through APT automated updates) but also personal search requests to Canonical headquarters by default does seem like a major privacy breach.

That the dictator of Ubuntu and Canonical brushes his responsibilities aside like this is downright scary if you ask me, especially given the argument is "we have root, we 0wn you already, sorry bud".

About every podcast I listen to now has a pleading about supporting them by going to their website and clicking on the Amazon banner ad so they get their beaks wet. Now the OS wants to do it too? Pass. I never to remember to do the link thing when shopping on Amazon anyway.

I already switched to LMDE when the Unity debacle started. Ubuntu is rapidly becoming the MySpace of distributions.

Having not used Ubuntu much since the Unity debacle (well, that is most of my Ubuntu systems stayed preUnity), I was curious about what my child was seeing in the library so installed Mint. Imperfect, but a lot more usable than Unity. Kudos to the school for taking the time to do a little homework.

I wish Mark and the Canonical team luck. The last several design choices have driven away technically literate people AND those aiming for the technically illiterate. No doubt there is some huge market that I'm ju

And THIS is modded funny? Stay classy slashdot. But in reality Microsoft always asks when they want to collect some anonymous data and it's always opt-in. With Google they outright collect and you have to know where to opt-out (if you even can).

I doubt that Fedora, ScientificLinux, Debian, or any number of other GNU/Linux distros or BSDs (or other free OSes that have yet to become popular or newsworthy) will all become ad supported. Believe it or not, some people are willing to volunteer time to help with an open source project. I have done it in the past, and I am not so unique.

The real future of OSes will be free versus non-free. The free OSes will be written by people who do not view their users as an exploitable resource, and those users

Seriously, networkmanager and resolvconf on the fucking server editions?

Explain how they're bad? Seriously. Just spouting off about some package and assuming everyone agrees with you that it's bad is silly. Not that network manager "cripples" a platform, or is somehow not removable.

It's fixable -- just uninstall network manager (and resolvconf) and configure the standard Debian config files and you're good to go, but network manager is just silly on a server. It's silly on any machine that isn't a laptop, but it's really silly on a server.

Yeah I saw that. Of course, truth is I don't recall Network Manager being used on Ubuntu Server for precisely the reason you point out. Last I checked you had to go out of your way to add it to server.

Actually, I wasn't the one who originally did. I only did so in response.

Explain how they're bad

Servers, almost by definition, don't move around much, and those that do will need a slightly more robust configuration by an intelligent operator, rather than having the static (or semi-static) configurations clobbered by a "helpful" utility. NM isn't much the issue anymore, but they replaced it with resolvconf, which makes a glorious pain in the ass out of itself by deciding it's smarter than you when it comes to your/etc/resolv.con

You do make yourself sound more than a little clueless with your obvious hostility to the opinions of people who actually know what they're talking about.

In short, NetworkManager is crude hack that may work reasonably well for some common laptop and workstation configurations, but otherwise tends to actively interfere with network configurations of any complexity. You would know this if you had ever used it with a network configuration of any complexity.

And once adult oriented results while be filtered, someone will ask to remove blasphematory results ( like India/Pakistan ), then someone will remove gay related content ( if this isn't already removed as "adult oriented result", as often with such filter ), then someone will remove violent game ( like in australia ),then users will also ask to not see song they already purchased songs from the result, and then RIAA will ask to not show pirate song and mp3.

Small children see breasts all the time, that is after all how very small children are nourished.

I can not speak to the values of your potential clients.

Why is it that this bug was raised for sexual content and not voilent content? Do you really think procreation and other normal activities are more dangerous for a child to be exposed too than violence?

Yeah great, so we get hardware manufacturers that makes drivers that only work with their plastic ui ubuntu versions. would be great if ubuntu could be the martyr that brings hardware drivers to linux, as long as they are provided in the standard packaging formats....